We built a bare metal cloud in downtown SF

A year ago, we looked at our own cloud bill and nearly spit out our coffee. For compute-heavy workloads, we were paying 3-5x what the hardware actually cost per month. Egress fees alone were bleeding us dry. And hypervisors? They add real overhead you can't see, can't control, can't remove.

So we asked the stupid question: why not just run real hardware?

Today, we're announcing 0phase — dedicated bare metal servers in a purpose-built datacenter in downtown San Francisco. No hypervisor tax. No egress fees. No hidden margins. Just physics and honesty.

Why we built this

The cloud promise was simple: infinite scale, pay for what you use, no operations headache. It worked great for someone's Slack clone. For people doing serious compute — ML training, scientific simulations, rendering, data processing — the math breaks down fast.

Hypervisor overhead is real. You lose performance, you lose memory, you lose predictability. And you pay anyway. The cloud providers count that overhead as your problem to absorb.

Egress is a protection racket. Data in is free. Data out costs $0.09/GB. It's designed to make you regret leaving. We've seen bills where egress was 40% of the total. That's not a cost, that's a hostage tax.

Compute pricing is margin-stacking. A c7i.2xlarge on AWS costs $0.314/hour (on-demand). The hardware costs about $800. At AWS's pricing, you pay that back in ~105 hours. Then they've made 7x more selling it to other people. We're not saying they're not entitled to margin, but the gap between what you pay and what the hardware costs is genuinely insane.

What we built

We took a floor in a modern downtown SF datacenter. Racked it with real hardware. Wrote the network and storage infrastructure. And now we're selling access to it at honest prices.

The facility is production-grade. Redundant power, redundant cooling, redundant network. We have pictures of the racking and stacking if you want to see it's not vaporware.

The hardware

Our base config: dual-socket Xeons, up to 768GB of ECC RAM, NVMe storage, and 10G unmetered networking. That's the machine. No virtual CPUs, no mysterious resource contention, no noisy neighbors by design.

You get root access. You can run whatever you want. Linux, BSD, custom kernels — doesn't matter. You own the hardware.

Pricing starts at $449/mo — the price on the site is the price you pay. We price monthly — no lock-in, no commitment surprises. If you leave, you own your data and your setup. No hostage situations.

Managed Kubernetes on bare metal

We're also running managed Kubernetes on this hardware. But here's the thing: your pods run on real machines, not nested VMs. You get the reliability of Kubernetes scheduling, but without the hypervisor tax. That's a real win for workloads where every percent of performance matters.

What's next

We have GPU nodes coming. More capacity coming. Multi-site strategy coming. But we're shipping what we have now because it's real and it works.

We're also running this in the open. If you want to see the facility, talk to us. If you have ideas about what you'd want from a bare metal provider, we're listening. We're not building this for some abstract market — we're building it because we needed it and assumed other engineers did too.